Grown-ups

Netflix told me that I would enjoy this exactly 1.5 stars. I thought to myself, now that seems a little harsh, I don’t think I’ve ever even rated anything one star yet on Netflix, this is mainly because I tend to self-select on things I like. In retrospect, I should have listened to Netflix. Grown-ups is just about one of the worst movies I’ve seen in the last year. So many good things going for it too, great cast, I absolutely love Adam Sandler, and am a fan of Chris Rock and David Spade as well (though haven’t seen either of them for a while). The cover is funny. Pudgy adult men men slide down a water slide. Ingenious.

But I think the fatal flaw of this movie is that it is trying to be too much. It tries to relate some serious message of how kids aren’t really kids anymore or something, while unsuccessfully trying be funny. In addition, this film assumes from the get go that we are “in” on all the insults, when the jokes themselves are just inside jokes of making fun of each other not even in a very original or funny. Unfortunately it all ends up netting out to a film that is very unfunny and very very boring.

The worst part of the whole movie is that the moral of the story isn’t even that great. The hero, Adam Sandler, is this exceedingly successful Hollywood agent, who has ungrateful spoiled children, and a hot fashionista snobby wife, Salma Hayek. His other 4 other friends who have not done as well for themselves financially. He is totally unlikeable in the beginning and gets only marginally more likeable throughout the movie, ordering around his maid and yelling to some poor chump on the phone, to pretending his maid/nanny is actually an exchange student cuz he’s embarrassed that she’s around? The plot culminates to a basketball game where the hero purposefully throws a game he could have easily won in order to give a victory to this guy he feels sorry for, because the other guy is sore about game they lost 30 years ago and works as a short order cook as a townie pizzeria and somehow “needs” the victory more. Talk about seriously condescending and this is somehow supposed to redeem him or something for being an asshole the rest of the time? If you’re confused, believe me, I’m right there with you.

You’d think with so much comic genius they would have been able to put something half-assed together, but it’s not smart or slap stick or goofy or anything. It just is. and it is for far too long. It was one of those movies that made me think, holy crap, I paid practically nothing for this since it was part of my streaming netflix deal, yet that was clearly too much, and definitely one of those movies where you wish you could just get your two hours back….$1